


Becoming

by Viridian5



Category: Fight Club
Genre: Drama, Introspection, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2000-05-15
Updated: 2000-05-15
Packaged: 2017-10-02 08:05:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,277
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Viridian5/pseuds/Viridian5
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Self-improvement or self-destruction? To some people, they look like the same thing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Becoming

**Author's Note:**

> If you've seen the movie, you know that some events here aren't exactly as they seem.

_"Self-improvement is masturbation. Self-destruction is  
the answer."_  
  -- Tyler Durden  
\---------------------------------------------------------------------------

I looked at myself in the cracked bathroom mirror and touched the swollen, tender skin over my left cheekbone. I'd reopened the cut through my left eyebrow again. At this rate it would scar. I smiled, then winced at how it hurt. I spat again, leaving a trail of red to blend with the rust staining the sink. Blood was the only thing I could smell or taste at the moment. Know yourself, Tyler would say. My ribs ached but I didn't think any of them were broken. I knew what broken ribs felt like, and what I had now wouldn't need a doctor's attention.

Good. I hated the hospital visits. How many times can one guy fall down the stairs? I was running out of hospitals to try on my emergency room safari.

I should take a few doctors as trophies.

I didn't need the distorting crack in the mirror to make me feel like I wasn't looking at my own face, which slowly changed shape over weeks of Fight Club. I was rewriting my mind and redrawing even the lines of my body. I didn't know how I would end up.

It terrified and thrilled me all at the same time.

The split skin and bruises made me even more invisible at work. People looked at me but they didn't see me, because if they saw what I looked like they might have to start caring and get involved. They probably thought I had some 300-pound girlfriend who beat the shit out of me.

Tyler's voice and spiky dark blond hair brushed my ear. "No, worse than that. They probably imagine all 300 pounds of her sitting on your face. If I had that going through my head every time I saw you, I wouldn't wanna look at you either."

It hurt to laugh.

You give people the option of what they want from others, they'd probably say they want someone who loves them. If they think about it harder--which is rare since most people don't think at all--they might say they want someone who really knows them. If they think about it a bit more, they might say they wanted someone who understood them. If they give it the most thought--impossible, right?--most people would probably say they want someone who condones them, who can justify everything they do as the right and only choice.

I've never seen the last type of dream person aside from the occasional broken, battered wife.

Tyler understands me. I don't think he'll consider condoning me until he's fixed me up the way he wants me. Until I'm more like him.

I don't seem to have a problem with that.

"Looking good, champ," Tyler said, his dark eyes gleaming at me in the reflection of us, him standing right behind me like a shadow. I could smell him, fresh from his own fight, all blood and sweat and dirt and something gamy. Cleaned up, with his cheekbones and pouty lips, he would look like a male model from one of those underwear ads. None of that interested him at all.

I smell the same way Tyler does. The carefully sterilized, hermetically sealed person I used to be, who now only lived in a tiny dark corner of my brain, had fits now and then about that and about my living conditions in this deathtrap of a house. Filth, mold, decay, roaches, termites, rusty water. It suspected that asbestos dust seeped from the peeling walls. It knew that I would fall through a broken step one night if I didn't get electrocuted while wading through the basement fixing the power during a storm.

Life is a terminal disease, with only one inevitable conclusion. I told that part of me that wanted to go back to our old, empty life to go fuck itself.

Freedom costs, and I've never been so alive in my life.

"I lost," I told Tyler, needling him a little.

He responded the way I figured he would. "Lost. Like winning the fight itself is the point. I could bring out that cliché about the journey and the destination, but you already know all that shit, so why bother?"

I knew him. Sometimes I understood him. I tried.

His callused fingertip traced the swollen lump on my cheekbone, making me shiver. Too sensitive, so sensitive that I didn't know whether it hurt or felt too good. It just _felt_. Wanting to feel had brought me here.

I kept shivering as he traced the new damage on my face. He kept varying the pressure.... At one point he swiped at the blood leaking from my cut and sucked it off his finger. I moaned at the sight. My fingers clenched on old, cracked porcelain. His other hand felt along my sore ribs before moving down to stroke my cock and cup my balls through my pants. He was already hard and pressing into my ass.

Now why couldn't doctors have this kind of bedside manner? Maybe then they'd be worth all the money.

"You want?" he breathed into my ear.

"I'm alive, right?"

"That's the idea."

He unzipped my pants and let his callused fingertips stroke and press my bare skin. I felt his smile over me going commando. I couldn't help closing my eyes and leaning back as his hand went to work, fondling, cupping. He knew exactly how to touch me, where, how hard, how long. He just knew.

He knew the very first time, my very first night here, the first time we met. Both of us bloody, bruised, and drunk off our asses, but he made me come so hard I thought I'd go blind. Only those damned squeaking mattress springs were louder than I was, and it turned out we knocked some plaster off the ceiling below us.

Tyler was grinding against me so hard that he kept pressing me into the sink, his cock sliding against my hole but not the way I wanted. "Fuck me," I moaned.

"Not tonight. I have a headache."

"Tyler!" I knew I couldn't convince him, not if he didn't want me to, not with the way he was snickering, so I said, "Then I want to touch you. Let me touch you."

"You are."

"You know what--"

"That's not the way it's going to be. Just lean back and enjoy."

Then I felt him thrust in smoothly. Tease. I didn't know when he'd slicked himself up and didn't care; I had Tyler inside me, and if he couldn't fill up all the empty spaces, he was as close as I'd come to it in this life. For now we were one mind, one purpose. He timed his pulls on my cock with his hard thrusts, his harsh breaths. I put my hand over his in a sneaky touch and moved with him. All the while his other hand skimmed the too-sensitive bruises on my face.

I was burning on the inside and drowning all at once. No more thinking or brooding allowed, not when I was lost under a pleasure that should have killed me. It felt too good; I didn't deserve this....

Orgasm stalked me, speeding up until it took me down in its teeth and claws. I think I screamed. I think my scream set him off, as he rammed into me with a last, short burst and came.

He was leaning over me as I leaned over the sink, exhausted, trying to put myself back together. He clung like my shadow. "Who won this round?" I gasped.

He just smiled.

  

### End


End file.
